Deconstructing Canada’s ballooning $67-billion federal bureaucracy

The federal public service has grown enormously under Justin Trudeau, but a few key departments have dominated growth – including the prime minister’s own Privy Council Office. (Photo By Gilles Y. Hamel/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

By Policy Options

Forty-three per cent.

That is how much Canada’s “core” federal public administration — the civil service — has grown since Justin Trudeau’s government took office in 2015. The raw numbers are even more striking. There are 110,738 more federal public servants employed today than a decade ago.

Not surprisingly, this rate of bureaucratic growth has faced some scrutiny.

Some have claimed that the increase was necessary to keep pace with population growth, yet Canada’s population only expanded by about 17 per cent over this period.

The COVID pandemic, and the programs and initiatives that were created to deal with it, is also cited as a factor. To be sure, the federal bureaucracy increased by about 35,000 during the three COVID years. But that means the rest of the personnel growth — more than two-thirds of it — happened before and after the pandemic.

If service to Canadians during this time had improved meaningfully, that might justify the rise, but there is little evidence of that. For example, complaints to the federal Office of the Taxpayers’ Ombudsperson about excessive wait times with Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) call centres were up 45 per cent in 2023. And stories of long wait times at passport offices are legion.

Such scenarios support the conviction that the federal government is bloated and in need of radical surgery. At the very least, some of this swelling of public service ranks should be examined and questioned.

Growth is concentrated in the Big Six

Where has most of the surge occurred?

More than half of the increase – 60,000 positions – has taken place in just six out of some 115 federal departments and agencies. Let’s call these the Big Six.

The largest increase – by 19,000 employees – has occurred at the CRA, a 48-per-cent expansion of its total staff.

That’s impressive, but in percentage terms it pales in comparison to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, which more than doubled in size with 105 per cent growth during that decade, equal to 6,700 additional employees.

Also noteworthy is Employment and Social Development Canada, which grew by some 18,000 personnel, or 86 per cent.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans increased by 4,800 or 49 per cent, while Public Services and Procurement Canada is bigger by 6,900 people or 57 per cent.

Rounding out the Big Six is the Department of National Defence, whose civilian workforce expanded by about 6,100. Ironically this occurred at the same time the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) have been hemorrhaging military personnel and are now more than 15,000 people short of the enlistment target set in the government’s 2017 defence policy. The CAF — which is facing major demands on its services at home and abroad — is probably now at its lowest military head count since the end of the Second World War.

Some of the hiring binges appear to be indicators of the government’s priorities and modus operandi.

The big hike at Citizenship, Immigration and Refugees, for example, is related to the Trudeau government’s aggressive (if not reckless) immigration policy, which in 2023 alone saw 469,000 new permanent residents admitted and over one million foreign student visas approved.

The staffing boom at Employment and Social Development Canada likely reflects the establishment of new social programs such as the Canada Child Benefit, Canada Dental Care Plan and various housing benefits.

For the CRA we can safely say that at least some of the expansion is owing to government efforts to track the underground economy and collect more tax revenue to pay for its agenda.

The increase at Public Services and Procurement Canada may have been caused by the urgent need during the pandemic to acquire mass quantities of everything from masks to vaccines. The rationale for the spike at Fisheries and Oceans is less obvious.

The peculiar case of the PCO

Looking beyond the Big Six, however, it is worth pointing out that the Privy Council Office (PCO) – the prime minister’s department – has ballooned by three quarters since Trudeau came to office, from 727 employees in 2015 to nearly 1,300 today.

Historically the PCO – which runs no programs and delivers no public services to Canadians – has been a secretariat of a few hundred people. Today it is 27 per cent larger than the Department of Finance, which is arguably Canada’s most important ministry, responsible for developing the government’s budget, tax and fiscal policies, among other things.

This nearly doubling of the PCO in just a decade is more evidence of the pernicious trend toward prime ministerial government, where collective Cabinet decision-making is replaced by prime ministerial fiat on most issues.

If Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre becomes the next prime minister, as is widely expected, and is serious about reducing the $40-billion federal deficit, trimming the public service payroll – which now runs to $67 billion per year, a staggering 68 per cent increase since 2016 – will have to be in his sights.

While Poilievre should definitely take aim at the Big Six, he also needs to lead by example and cut his own department in half. No Canadian beyond the shadow of the Parliament buildings would notice.

This article first appeared on Policy Options and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.